Forget about the old Petri dishes and culture media! A brilliant new method for the growing of microorganisms in order to study their behavior, especially in a large community, again tracking the phenomenon of quorum sensing , has been developed and put to use.

The new invention, by Connell et al., resembles a trapping sack for microorganisms, made of bovine serum albumin covalently cross-linked by laser lithography to form a three dimensional structure. These harboring chambers are very small, with a 2 to 6 picoliter capacity, and are permeable, and thus allowing an infinite influx of nutrients and other essential small molecules for the bacteria growing inside.

Scientists have already compared the growth rates of Pseudomonas cells in “the trap sacks” to those in conventional culture media and mouse lungs and the results were promising! The new technique allows them to study patterns of antibiotic resistance, infection and biofilm formation more clearly and in earlier phases of bacterial growth…

Source: Science magazine, Vol. 330 issue 6004.

Image source: Microbiology Bytes

“Get me more, mummy!” demands one youngster bacterium, pointing to the drops of antibiotic reaching the colony headquarters.

Come on! FOR REAL?

Sadly very true and it is not even that infrequent either! I only became aware of this after reading about a study, where researchers in HMS, led by Dr. George M. Church, collected soil samples in an experiment, attempting to search for more bio-diversity and were stunned to see that as they added antibiotics to these bacterial cultures, the bacteria didn’t seem to mind at all!

Unlike human beings, bacteria tend to like sharing. The more they share their strategic defenses, the more prosperity they end up living in. Again, to our dismay, such fear was translated into reality, as this has already extended to the pathogenic minorities of the bacterial world in a new study, published in January in the International Journal of Tuberculosis and Lung Disease. Scientists, in China, have stumbled upon a strain of tuberculosis-causing bacteria, called Mycobacterium tuberculosis, INCAPABLE of growing adequately in the absence of rifampicin. This is as ominous as such news can get.

This strain was discovered as physicians attempted to treat a TB-infected patient with a regimen which included rifampicin. Unexpectedly, his condition worsened and only upon the removal of rifampicin did he start feeling better, until eventually full recovery. Already, reports of multidrug-resistant TB “MDR” have been around for some time. Normally, the treatment course includes more than 1 drug to be able to effectively kill the bacteria. Apparently, the bacteria have found a way to get around that!

We can only wonder: which antibiotic is next?